The Mars Volta

LET'S SAY some arcane branch of alchemy made it possible to
distill the surrealism of painters like Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo,
and Remedios Varo through the acid-rock filter of Blue Cheer,
King Crimson, and Can; the resulting brew might give you a decent
approximation of what the Mars Volta’s music sounds like.
Barring that, it’s probably best to approach the band’s sixth studio
album by preparing to have the top of your head sheared off.

Noctourniquet (Warner) is a turbulent slab of hard-driving
rock, tempered with swirling eddies of ambient psychedelia
and finely crafted electronic effects and filigrees—par for the
course, longtime fans of the band will say, but as with any
Mars Volta project, there’s an underlying method to the madness.
This one started, according to guitarist and producer
Omar Rodríguez-López, with a bit of a spat he got into with
lead singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala.

“After 20 years of being friends, Cedric
and I have had very few arguments,” Rodríguez-
López explains. “But he wanted to take his
time to work on this record, and he didn’t like
me being on top of him like I usually am. So
it was strange for me because I recorded the
music right after Octahedron [2009], but it
was about two-and-a-half years before Cedric
got around to writing his lyrics. I think he
accomplished what he set out to do, though—
I mean, I consider a song like ‘Empty Vessels
[Make the Loudest Sound]’ to be his best
work to date.”

The song’s trippy intimacy makes his point,
but first things first: The instrumental tracks for
Noctourniquet were laid down, for the most part,
at Rodríguez-López’s Pro Tools-based E-Clat
studio in Guadalajara, Mexico, but unlike past
Mars Volta albums, he ended up keeping a good
deal of the demo parts he recorded himself (on
guitars, synths and bass) instead of giving them
to the rest of the band—specifically, bassist Juan
Alderete and keyboardist (and younger brother)
Marcel Rodríguez-López—to re-cut. “I played
most of it, but Juan is a longtime ally and I didn’t
want to upset him,” Rodríguez-López clarifies.
“And this will be the last record where I’m the
sole composer of the music or the dictator of the
band, because I definitely want to open it up. A
big part of that awakening was running into an
artist like Deantoni Parks.”

Gifted with an almost surgical grasp of
rhythm, a boatload of hard funk chops, and
the instincts of a free-jazz drummer twice
his age, Parks brings an energy to Noctourniquet
that pushes a song like “The Whip
Hand,” which opens the album, into slicedup
time signatures and heady grooves that
the band hasn’t really tried before. In the last
few years, the Mars Volta have gone through
drummers the way Jimi Hendrix went
through guitars, so the importance of landing
Parks, who’s known for his work with
everyone from John Cale to Meshell Ndegeocello,
isn’t lost on Rodríguez-López.

“He’s a kindred spirit,” he says, referring to
Parks’ ability to listen just once to a demo and
not only duplicate whatever drum machine
pattern Rodríguez-López could throw at him,
but change it up slightly with taste and precision.
“I don’t think we did more than two takes
on anything, and we usually took his first take.
If we did more than that, it was merely for my
own enjoyment because I was so blown away
by what I was hearing.”

For all his hardcore roots, Rodríguez-López
insists he didn’t record and mix Noctourniquet
as a rock album, but looked instead to the classic
dub reggae sound that he has mined in the past
(starting in the late ’90s with De Facto, a dubbed out
side project of the Mars Volta’s previous punk
incarnation At the Drive-In). It’s the foundation,
for example, of the epic “In Absentia”—a marauding
beast of synthesized pads, cavernous
echo-flanges, and stripped dub-style beats.

Layering a Roland SH-101, a Dave Smith
Mopho, and several Doepfer A-100 patches,
Rodríguez-López ran the synth parts, along
with bass and Parks’ drums, through several
treatments for the song’s A section, eventually
bouncing nearly 20 tracks down to a stereo
mix he could continue working from. For the
choruses, he used a Critter & Guitari Kaleidoloop
to sample and loop the effects treatments
that were hanging over from the A section,
creating an undulating sheet of synth washes
and cascading after-effects.

“There’s no true meter to the chorus,” he
says, “so I had to turn off all that sh*t and
just give Cedric a click and a drone to sing
over. I used to mic his voice with [an AKG]
C12, but for this one—for the whole record,
in fact—I used a [Neumann] U67 and sometimes
a U48 to get a darker sound. Once we
got the right take, I turned on all the other
stuff.” In the final mix, Bixler-Zavala’s vocals
were run again through SoundToys’ EchoBoy
and Decapitator, pushing the song further
into a disorienting, dreamlike fugue that recalls
early Pink Floyd or even Pet Sounds-eraBeach Boys.

Production moves like these abound on
Noctourniquet, from the quirky Critter & Guitari
handheld synth that opens “Vedamalady” to
the vibrato-soaked guitars (aided by a Maestro
Phaser and a Boss VB-2 Vibrato) that wander
through “Imago.” Working with longtime engineer
and synth expert Lars Stalfors, Rodríguez-
López mixed the album in L.A. with a simple
plan in mind: Don’t mix it like a rock record,
and don’t waste any time thinking about it.

“You can definitely get caught up in thinking
some of these songs might be difficult to
mix,” he says. “They can, unless you’re completely
reckless, which is something I really
have fun doing. I mean, I put a lot of guitar
parts on right before the mix, just with my
Ibanez [AX120 Custom] and whatever pedals
I had lying around. But I’ve written, recorded,
and mixed about 20 albums in the last three
years, so I’ve done a lot of experimenting, and
like I said, this was a strange record for me.
I’m used to taking what I always say are snapshots—
Polaroids—of where I’m at, and this was
different. It was more drawn-out, but maybe
that’s what needed to happen.”

Bill Murphy is a freelance writer based in
New York City, and a regular contributor to
Electronic Musician and Bass Player.